Natural Frontiers Revisited: France's Boundaries since the Seventeenth Century Author(s): Peter Sahlins Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 95, No. 5 (Dec., 1990), pp. 1423-1451 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2162692 Accessed: 06-10-2016 19:04 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2162692?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms American Historical Association, Oxford University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Historical Review This content downloaded from 128.59.222.107 on Thu, 06 Oct 2016 19:04:20 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Natural Frontiers Revisited: France's Boundaries since the Seventeenth Century PETER SAHLINS UNTIL ABOUT FIFTY YEARS AGO, the idea of France's natural frontiers was a commonplace in French history textbooks and in scholarly inquiry into Old Regime and revolutionary France. The idea, as historian of the revolution Albert Sorel wrote in 1885, was that "geography determined French policy": that, since the sixteenth, if not the twelfth, century, France had undertaken a steady and consistent expansion to reach the Atlantic, Rhine, Alps, and Pyrenees.' These were "the limits that Nature has traced," which Cardinal Richelieu had proclaimed, the same boundaries "marked out by nature" invoked by Georges-Jacques Danton. From the architect of absolutism to the representatives of the National Convention, the idea had been a guiding principle of foreign policy and a central term in the definition of French unity. According to historian Albert Mathiez, writing in the 1920s, the Convention merely "cloaked in a red bonnet the old monarchical politics of natural frontiers"-even if the idea of natural frontiers had not always been explicitly invoked by those in power.2 The idea of France's natural frontiers still surfaces occasionally in textbook accounts of French expansion, but most historians of France today dismiss the "doctrine" of natural frontiers as too teleological a reading of France's history. In this, they owe an unacknowledged debt to French historian Gaston Zeller (1890- 1960). A native of Clermont-Ferrand, Zeller taught for thirteen years at the University of Strasbourg, where in 1933 he succeeded Lucien Febvre in the chair of modern history.3 But, unlike Febvre, Zeller retained a passionate and unrelent- ing interest in "the history of events," writing extensively about France's eastern frontiers: the conquest and annexation of Metz, Lorraine, and Alsace during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These concerns, combined with his own experience before and during World War II, profoundly influenced his attack on the "false idea" of natural frontiers.4 I would like to thank James Amelang, Linda Colley, Natalie Zemon Davis, Peter Gay, John Merriman, four anonymous readers for the AHR, and especially L. A. Kauffman, for their constructive criticisms of an earlier version. 1 Albert Sorel, Europe et la Re'volutionfrancaise, Vol. 1: Les Moeurs politiques et les traditions (Paris, 1885), 244-337; 246. 2 Albert Mathiez, Histoire de la Revolutionfrancaise, 3 vols. (Paris, 1924), 2: 166. 3 Paul Vaucher, "Gaston Zeller," Revue historique, 225 (1961): 530-32; Georges Livet, "L'Institut et la chaire d'histoire moderne de la Faculte des lettres de Strasbourg de 1919 a 1955," Bulletin de la Faculte' des lettres de Strasbourg, 36 (1957-58): 204-09. 4 Zeller's principal arguments are summed up in "La Monarchie d'Ancien Regime et les frontieres naturelles," Revue d'histoire moderne, 8 (1933): 305-33; and "Histoire d'une idee fausse," Revue de synthkse, 11-12 (1936): 115-31. Further material is contained in La France et l'Allemagne depuis dix sikcles (Paris, 1932), and his doctoral thesis, La Reunion de Metz & la France (1552-1648), 2 vols. (Paris, 1926), 1: passim. 1423 This content downloaded from 128.59.222.107 on Thu, 06 Oct 2016 19:04:20 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 1424 Peter Sahlins Zeller's pointed rebuttal of the "doctrine" focused almost exclusively on France's claim to the Rhine, an understandable fixation for a pacifist and patriot historian writing in a political climate of growing French and German militarism between the wars. Zeller believed that to write the history of the idea was to demystify the concept, to remove it from the realm of 'journalism" and "ideology." It was a reaction shared by many others, among them Lucien Febvre, who published his own historical geography of the Rhine with Albert Demangeon in 1935.5 With typical erudition and impatience, Zeller demonstrated how irrelevant the "ideolo- gy" of natural frontiers was to French foreign policy objectives before 1792 and how a widespread invocation of the notion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was tied more to popular textbook constructions of national identity, and to journalistic appeals to nationalism, than to historical verisimilitude. Taking as a point of departure the life and work of Gaston Zeller and the rich and detailed evidence he collected, this essay reopens the case of France's natural frontiers. It examines the history of the idea since the seventeenth century in the double context of French foreign policy interests and the symbolic construction of French national identity. As a model for state building, the idea of natural frontiers sometimes provided the justification, sometimes the organizing principle, of French foreign policy. As a model of French identity, it formed part of a constitutive myth of the state. Natural frontiers appeared as one element within the shifting configuration of symbols and images of an ideal unity, a unity that drew alternately on the ideas of a shared language, a common history, and a bounded, delimited territory.6 Statesmen, diplomats, administrators, military officials, historians, and geogra- phers all invoked the idea of natural frontiers as a defining feature of France's geography and history. In their hands, the idea frequently played a role within a legitimating discourse that served to rationalize French claims of territorial expansion and, occasionally, actually determined short-term foreign-policy objec- tives. Yet the functions played by the concept do not disclose its shifting fields of meaning over three centuries. The uses (and abuses) of the idea were framed by shifting conceptions of territory, history, and nature as these took shape within French state building since the seventeenth century. AN OFT-CITED PASSAGE FROM Cardinal Richelieu's Political Testament once seemed sufficient to establish the centrality of the idea of natural frontiers within his overall Lucien Febvre reviewed the thesis favorably, while criticizing Zeller's study of Metz for containing "too many facts and parasitical details"; Revue d'histoire moderne, 3 (1928): 44. 5 Lucien Febvre and Albert Demangeon, Le Rhin: Problemes d'histoire et d'economie (Paris, 1935). 6 The distinction between "models of" and "models for" is adapted from Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 93-94, although I do not accept his idea of a "pre-established, non-symbolic system," which cultural models render meaningful. Recent studies of the symbolic construction of France include C. Beaune, Naissance de la nation France (Paris, 1986), and the contributions to the collective volumes edited by P. Nora, Les Lieux de memoire: La Republique (Paris, 1984); La Nation, 3 vols. (Paris, 1986); and Les France, 3 vols. (Paris, forthcoming). Recent considerations of French space and national territory include Daniel Nordman, "Des limites d'Etat aux frontieres nationales," in Nora, ed., Les Lieux de memoire, La Nation, 2: 35-61; Espacefrancais: Vision et amenagement, XVIe-XIXe siecle, catalogue of the exhibition at the Archives Nationales, September 1987-January 1988 (Paris, 1987); Joseph W. Konvitz, "The Nation-State, Paris, and Cartography in 18th and 19th Century France," Journal of Historical Geography, 16 (1990): 3-16; and Daniel Nordman and Jacques Revel, "La Formation de l'espace francais," in Histoire de la France, Vol. 1: L'Espacefrancais, Jacques Revel, ed. (Paris, 1989), 29-169. This content downloaded from 128.59.222.107 on Thu, 06 Oct 2016 19:04:20 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Natural Frontiers Revisited 1425 foreign policy: "It was the goal of my ministry to restore to Gaul the limits that Nature has traced for her, to submit all the Gauls to a Gallic king, to combine Gaul with France, and everywhere the ancient Gaul had been, to restore the new one."7 Zeller dismissed the text because, in the tradition of Voltaire, he correctly doubted its authorship. Indeed, the apocryphal Testamentum Christianum (1643), from which the passage was drawn, was the work of Father Philippe Labbe, the Jesuit geographer and royal publicist. The text now attributed to Richelieu himself,